European Parliament
Sari Essayah  (PPE ).
(FI)
Mr President, Commissioner, some 130 people are on death row in Japan, and they are now at greater risk of being executed, because the new Justice Minister, Toshio Ogawa, publicly announced on 15 January 2012 that he thought that reintroducing the death sentence was a duty.
We in the European Parliament condemn various terrorist acts, such as the attack on the Tokyo underground in 1995, and we should not show any sign of sympathy towards such acts. The death penalty, however, is the wrong answer, and is a flagrant breach of a fundamental human right of every human being: namely, the right to life. We therefore appeal to the Japanese Government to abolish the death penalty in the country altogether.

